There's a lot to be said about the American political dynamic and SF,
especially in an age when the right-libertarian impulse is so ascendant here.
I don't begrudge anyone the effort; it strikes me as important subject matter.
I do wish, without much hope, that journalists making such efforts would
occasionally go to the trouble of knowing things.

Thursday, February 9

Monday, February 6

Terminal 5, Heathrow. A Science-Fiction-right-now scene - all glass and
girders, bright lights, giant screens playing ads for BMW and the Olympics and
Gray Goose Vodka. (The bottle opens, clear liquid splashes onto ice in a
tumbler, some guy does a high dive, the car rounds a corner sportily, the
gymnasts celebrate, your correspondent's mind numbs.)

I'm leaning against a glass railing. The lady sitting next to me, Japanese I
think, has offered me a thin foam pad to sit on. It is infinitely more
comfortable than the floor, and I am thinking either that this particular
Japanese lady is exceptionally clever or that she comes from a culture which
has thought through one of the basic problems of travel better than mine ever
did.

I'm trying to maintain some sort of dystopian through line to my thoughts,
colored first by having spent the last couple of weeks in Hungary, where a pack
of protofascist right-wing populists are busily destroying the basic
institutions of a democratic society, and secondly by having spent yesterday
shuffling through a sequence of inscrutable airport failure modes because the
British don't know about snow.

I want to be all moodily intellectualizing and shit, but people —
middle aged Japanese travelers, hyperconservative Hungarian Star Trek
fans, harried airline checkin clerks — keep making this difficult by
being basically decent.

Thursday, February 2

I have just realized that I hate most travel writing. The whole
doomed, formulaic aesthetic of the thing. The evaluative tones of restaurant
critics applied to cities and countries and people. The labored wringing of
metaphor from landscape. The desperate ennui of authors pacing back and forth
across flattened geographies of the mind which must at all costs yield meaning
before final paragraphs. Local color. Measured use of dialect. Surprising
worldliness. Shocks of recognition. The hopeless sense of displacement. The
whole world a dull mirror reflecting the endless indistinguishable constructed
selves of privileged interlopers and day-tripping supplicants to some
significance supposedly unattainable in native homes.